kathrwn

[kathrwn]

The End of Adorability

Between hops and jumps and shakes of her hips, Chuu, a member of the Korean girl group LOONA belts out declarations of her crush: 

Pounding more and more I’ll give it all, take my heart Surely you’re my destiny It shines fully in my heart This must be what thrill feels like, darling

She goes on to continue her awakening, her white heart turning red with affection, her perfect infatuation with the object of her desire. Just how grand it is to have someone to think about all the time, to have them be the sextant of your starry eyes. 

Like all of LOONA’s music, and much of all pop music, this cuteness is manufactured in several steps, starting with a Swede and a keyboard writing out melodies that trail in your mind. As many have described before, Korean pop music is exemplary of late-stage capitalism. Slavish systems subject boys and girls to little pay, long hours, and gallons of hair bleach. While the girls in LOONA, also known as 이달의 소녀, or “girl of the month,” are just one in a long line of immaculately conceived, unblemished, and hyper-manicured girl group, they are also an experiment in the limits of the genre.

LOONA’s particular gimmick was their “pre-debut” format. Every month, or whereabouts, a new girl was introduced, along with her debut single, her key color, and any other symbols her managers could merchandise to enthusiastic, often adult men, fans. 

With cuteness turned into a science (big eyes, big smiles, big proclamations of love), it’s now an obvious commodity. This is not new--girl groups have been capitalizing on puppy-eyed love since the Supremes cooed for their collective boyfriend, “'Cause baby love, my baby love, been missing ya, miss kissing ya/Instead of breaking up/Let's start some kissing and making up.” With matching outfits, matching hair, and matching choreography, the Supremes turned saccharine sentiments into record sales and timeless songs that still find their way into break up playlists to this day. 

Nothing makes LOONA exceptionally different in substance, but style is emblematic of an obvious factory-ization of young pop songstresses. Curated teaser images would hint at the attitude of the girl and her song--was she sassy, was she sweet, was she showing just enough shoulder to make you want to listen to her track but still remain modest. When a song dropped, the hype train could not be derailed by a single negative comment. If you didn’t like Girl #6’s song, that’s okay, There are still eleven more girls to wow you with mini-skirts and come-hither gazes.

There are twelve girls, one to meet everyone’s taste, one to guarantee that there is always at least one hook. Severed from any notion of organic foundation, LOONA was built to eat dollars. They were handpicked--the cutest girls--to be made up and dressed up beyond recognition, beyond practicality. 

The high drama of Korean pop music announces through aegyo and gwiyomi songs has stolen cute. Adorability is arbitrated by distant marketers who prescribe the appropriate level of blush to tug at our collective heartstring. 

No matter how many dance and song covers you watch, nothing quite obtains that oomph of the original. Production value notwithstanding, there should be no difference between watching some girl in a floofy skirt twirl with a smile over another. Stage presence and charisma are not givens for K-pop performers anyway. 

With Korean music CEOs holding a monopoly on what is cute, what is left for the masses? How do we reclaim soft loveliness, sweet smiles, and a need to cherish and protect for everyone else?

Cuteness has never awarded someone wealth or power alone. Those select few women who were beautiful, with pale ankles and studied seductiveness--they had cunning, a lot of money, and a family name to propel them through the history books. When cuteness is turned into a commodity of epic proportions, it starts to become alien. There is nothing recognizable in these beautiful people. Their beauty was created and is sustained by capital, and it is their access to capital that heightens their beauty. They are untouchable and therefore incorruptible.  When beauty is defined--perhaps not through words, but in repeated images and ideals--it is sectioned off from those who cannot afford it. To look beautiful without the $500 concealer or the three-hour hair treatment is to appropriate beauty from its most devout practitioners. 

Edmund Burke attempted to absolve ideas of beauty from mathematical calculations. He wrote “that although beauty in general is annexed to no certain measures common to the several kinds of pleasing plants and animals; [ ] there is a certain proportion in each species absolutely essential to the beauty of that particular kind,” trying to sever ties from aesthetics and proportion. “But,” he later continued “if proportion has not this power, it may appear odd how men came originally to be so prepossessed in its favor.” 

But it is not odd, the obsession of proportion. The neatness and trimness of a beautiful object is a natural compulsion to feel at ease with patterns and order. Its edges make sense, its corners are placed pleasingly, it is an object that is easy for your eyes to absorb. While there are plenty of beautiful objects that can invoke anxiety before eventually invoking pleasure, it remains that people are more drawn to something more calming to look at.  

But beauty and adorability have been removed from their natural precipices and are now manufactured. A symmetric and proportionate face can only get you so far. When the cultural arbiters designate that the cat-eye eyeliner is in again, or that your blush should be a cooler tone rather than a normal one, and when all of this “advice” is coupled with luxury clothes sponsorships, and the wondrous feeling of puppy love well… save some for the rest of us. 

[kathrwn]

We are doomed to reboot the past

Human immortality has been reached. Not through the de-fictionalizing of suspended animation, nor through the ability to upload your conscience into a mainframe, but rather through the backwash of intellectual property.

The death of creativity was foretold by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 attempt to cryogenically freeze the progress of humanity, preventing any life from forming after the neoliberalization of the world. Fukuyama predicted that Western-style liberal democracy will take over the world, and with it, capitalism. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of megacorporations, like Disney, who buy major media properties and smaller media megacorporations, subsume their intellectual property licenses, and spit out iterations of the same four franchises to make easy money on nostalgia-clouded adult fanboys. 

We see this most profoundly in the recent announcement of a new Ghostbusters reboot. Ghostbusters: Afterlife comes after the failed 2016 reboot, one that was met with universal mehs and accusations of leveraging nostalgia for a movie that was ultimately forgettable. Between the 2016 release and near-universal panning of the all-lady Ghostbusters and the 2020 release of the edgy, sepia-toned reboot, we can assume no producer learned a lesson. 

If the reboot of a well-beloved movie fails, why be willing to bet that a second reboot will do any better, especially one that strays further from the original in terms of major tropes and tone? For the same exact reason they even made a first reboot: to leverage nostalgia into sales. 

See, nearly everything doing numbers on the big screen comes in two flavors: nostalgia bomb or thing referencing nostalgia. There is no future that does not look like our current world, there is no new media that is not riding on the backs of past works. Not in a smart, “great artists steal” way, but in a way that there will never be any new intellectual property ever again. As the second Star Wars reboot-trilogy comes to an end, Disney has assured us that this is not the end of Star Wars, but simply the end of the Skywalker saga. Meanwhile, Baby Yoda, hand-crafted for easy tsum-tsum-ification, [regular old Yoda voice] for a new generation, becomes the fan favorite. 

And like Star Wars, superheroes are reaching reboot saturation, enough for every generation to have a Spider-Man reboot-and-a-half, as well as two unique Batmans. In numbers, that’s six Spider-Men flicks across seventeen years starting in 2002, not counting cameos in Avengers nor the animated Spider-verse movie about a different Spider-Man. And counting Batmen? From 1989 to now, there are ten Batman movies, not counting the only good one, which was 2019’s Joker. To make matters more dire, it is not as though audiences are paced through these reboots. No, in fact, the turn around from Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man series, to Tom Holland’s first-appearance in the Spidey suit was a measly two years. So little time, one might not be able to tell they are different series, rather than reverse puberty for Garfield. 

It is no secret that franchises, remakes, and retellings garner major box-office moolah. Of the fifty top-grossing movies of all time, fewer than a handful are original properties, not based on existing franchises, in existing universes, or retelling existing films. Adjust for inflation, and the top-grossing film of all time is still based on an existing property. Get ready for the Scarlett O’Hara cinematic universe to really take off in the 2020s.

Remakes have been around for decades, sure, but the rate at which we are having a story we have already seen repackaged with a handsomer lead and an HD-er camera into this strange zone where media megacorporations hope that no one will not want to see the same origin story seven times in two decades. When they remade A Star is Born for the millennial crowd, at least they waited forty-two years since Babs had her chance (who had waited twenty-two years since the Judy Garland version, which was also a remake). 

As established above, remakes and renewing franchises are not novel. But they do not only exist in our visual media. One of the key elements of Fukuyama’s curse is that every nation and people will produce their own rehashing of liberal democracy, until the world knows nothing beyond neoliberalism. That every country will lay itself at the altar of free-market capitalism and democratic forces, and with it, the repeated failings of bootstrapism, of first-past-the-post, of campaign finance and cable news. There will be hiccups, and minor steps backwards, but there is no dialect beyond the one we currently live in. That our media should reflect our politics--prepare the people to learn that they won’t get anything new ever because it’s risky to the bottom line--is an incredible bout of luck.

The end of history and the end of creativity are interlocked hands, praying that no one sees through their well-financed lies. We are fed the same garbage from the 80s ad nauseam because we will never heal from the wounds dealt by Reagan and Thatcher and their international allies. We will never heal from the 80s because that’s when the whole world went to shit. 

The end of history is the end of the cycles that propelled us forward. That every so often there was a great war, and every so often there was an economic crash, and every so often there was a major Kennedy-based news item. No, the end of history is that, like our political and economic systems, our entertainment will halt, with no world imaginable outside of what we’ve already seen.

We are doomed to reboot the past.

[kathrwn]

Shockingly Wicked and Wickedly Dumb

I’m going to preface this with a confession: I have not and have no intention of seeing Netflix’s recent terribly-named Ted Bundy-fetishization vehicle. People will ask me to justify that, to which I’ll say eat my shorts or something equally unfrightening. I don’t remember when this movie came out, and I don’t care to look up reviews, because I want my sword to be as blinded by ignorance as it is sharp. Do not test me. 

Every time I open Netflix to watch Kiernan Shipka deliver camp and high school method acting in the gritty Sabrina reboot, Netflix pegs me as someone who is interested in watching “true crime.” Maybe this is my fault for letting my roommate use my Netflix account, but I’m not interested in watching murder documentaries when I could watch Kiernan Shipka in that little white wig. Yes! She can’t act her way out of a paper bag, but we love a witch who solves puzzles. 

I understand why some people might like true crime. It’s less campy than any given Agatha Christie adaptation, and its like horror-but-real. I hate it for the same reasons. It’s a sober genre that takes kid gloves to pull off right, and the only person who ever pulled it off right (Sarah Koenig) was never able to hit that high again. What audiences are left with is snuff with a facade of art--entertainment of the lowest brow covered up by words like “documentary” and “true story” and a wink. Every dead body is a character exploration, but not of the families that live with survivor’s guilt. Instead, each victim is a stroke of some deranged murderer’s painting, which should’ve been burned, but some intrepid directors decided it should enter the cultural zeitgeist.

Compare, then, true crime to any other type of widely-consumed documentary. Food and travel shows, not unlike Parts Unknown, or nature serials, Planet Earth, are not dissimilar in logos. Take things other people have done (Vietnamese chef, Mother Nature) and stick a camera in front of it and add commentary. One major difference, though, is people didn’t have to die for these two examples. There is no violence in these things, or at least not human-human brutality in the case of Planet Earth. Those two documentary sub-genres are actually worthwhile. They teach us about the world we live in. True crime does not.

Someone will disagree with me, saying that true crime enumerates the multitude of ways in which humans will be unbearably, utterly, demonically cruel to each other. Okay? So does fiction. And nobody had to die for Eric Kripke to send Dean Winchester to Hell.

[kathrwn]

Lana Del Rey is rotting your brain

Read with footnotes here.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: Lana Del Rey does not exist. No, since she is the character performed by the artist Lizzie Grant, whose uncritical approach to American nostalgia does more to invoke the helplessness of American apocalyptica than to make us yearn for simpler times. And just as Lana does not exist, neither does any depth to the project of Miss Del Rey. Between winged eyeliner, prairie dust photo filters, and an affected croon, Lana Del Rey manages to be both campy and pretentious, and does neither particularly well. 

Looking at Lana Del Rey music videos, there are similarities which together comprise a Lana “image,” or a sort of aesthetic uniform which unites the Lana Del Rey Cinematic Universe. Often there are post-production filters which evoke old-school photographs of your mom’s cousin in the 60s, references to film and music stars of the 50s, and a misplaced fetish for the “good ol’ days” of America which turns grit into surface-level beauty. 

Thematic focus is good, especially when the singer is a construction, like Lana is. Critics are quick to notice her sharp devotion to her bit, calling her music a “Southern Californian dream world constructed out of sad girls and bad boys, manufactured melancholy and genuine glamour,” or “a blown-out Hollywood production.” Lana has described herself as a “Lolita got lost in the hood” or even a “Gangsta Nancy Sinatra” which critics have called straight “manufactured.” 

While plenty of songstresses presently play with the heights of glamour that women are expected to summit in the spotlight--Lady Gaga, Cher, and Dolly Parton come to mind instantly--many of them inject irony or camp into their performances, their outfits, their presentation. Parton in particular loves to joke about herself, famously quipping “I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde.” 

It undeniable to say these three women also play characters in their music--Lady Gaga is not nobility, Cher’s Twitter is filled with political commentary, Dolly Parton is, of course, not even blond. Lana also plays a character, but why is the Lana character a failure compared to the others? It’s not for want of production--many women pop stars are over-, perhaps even hyper-produced to drive the point home about the disinfectant power pop music holds over artists. Lana is also over-produced, somehow giving her music an auditory sepia tone, as though it were a film from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

But perhaps that’s it--Lana, as a character, is reactionary. She invokes a time well-past, and one well-past for good reason. The 50s and 60s were not heavenly for all, certainly not for black people, not for gay people, nor political dissidents. Lana’s music draws on themes that attempt to highlight the teeming hate and anger of midcentury America, but ultimately fail when she refers to herself as “[y]our Venice bitch” and prides herself on wearing “his favorite sundress” but with a strange sincerity. Often times, Lana infantilizes herself, referring to her lover as “Daddy,” or worrying that he is so superficial he might not love her, perhaps most famously, when she is “no longer young and beautiful.” 

That is not to say that Lana is vapid, but she has adopted the veneer of being so. She has unwittingly become a crooner for the past when her worth was tied to a sexual currency. Her uncritical love for glam and grand cinematisme is part of her pastiche act. But because she is nostalgic, and rarely, if ever, scathing when she sings about outdated courtship and relationship dynamics, she shows just how empty her actual songs are. In dying to know if she will be loved when her skin is no longer elastic, Lana never manages to find validation and closure in herself, instead tying her worth even tighter to a man she calls her “sun,” who plays with her “like a child.” Cool and normal. Newer songs follow this same trend, with cuts like “You’re beautiful and I’m insane, We’re American made” doing little to flatter herself, then listing off American inventions like “Hallmark” and “Norman Rockwell.” (The Norman Rockwell thing is especially weird when she follows it immediately with references to sex and then calling herself--again!--“your little Venice bitch.”) 

There’s nothing many Americans love more than Americana and sincerely yearning for a time they never experienced. Lana, perhaps, is the most “I was born in the wrong decade” singer to grace our airways. Her songs make love, even uneven and abusive love, the ultimate goal. Letting summer--a time that is eternal in the LDRCU and, supposedly, California--wash over her and her lovers until the cocaine and ocean consume them. 

Then, it’s no surprise this cheeky political compass places Lana in the libertarian right segment--she is made to sell, to hit some pleasure center in impressionable brains, to be a sweet spot in pop music that guarantees profits will be made from her work. Her songs are chock full of concrete imagery, which allows them to become realized in her audience's mind, rather than relying on letting the listener make their own emotional connections. There is nothing wrong with that, but it shows why the Del Rey song formula is as successful as it is soulless.

Take, for instance, her famous “Summertime Sadness.” From the red dress she wears, to the pale moonlight, to the “telephone wires above... Sizzling like a snare” we can recreate the scene in our heads. These lines are so evocative, so palpable in what they describe, it wouldn’t be hard at all to envision yourself standing in her same pair of high heels.

However, there is a marked absence of irony or self-awareness in her discography. Her sincerity is her downfall. When she sings “Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain, You like your girls insane,” does she mean it. And she really means it. She prides herself on her lyrical tendency to degrade women. 

This is not a new criticism of Lana. She herself has said “the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, ‘God, I’m just not really that interested,'” which is proof that Lana is so massively lacking in any self-awareness that her music becomes pointless, useless, and dumb. How is being interested in SpaceX and Tesla at all incompatible with the basic philosophy of women’s liberation and complete personhood? What about the women who were unable to be astrophysicists in the past, but are now writing the algorithms that take us to those “intergalactic possibilities”? How about the droves of young women who unironically listen to this schlock, call themselves insane, and then have no clue how to be a part of a functioning, normal relationship, because they think they have to be a crazy minx? Actually, even better, what about the bat shit insane way Elon Musk treats women, like when he famously pulled his bride aside and told her he was “the alpha.” It’s just bonkers how popular Lana Del Rey’s line of thinking is. That somehow feminism is incompatible with the fetishism of science? 

Perhaps that’s where Lana Del Rey stands out. As soft rock and easy listening DJs give us “Fight Song” and “Firework” ad nauseum, we have grown weary of the female empowerment song. Any song that wasn’t “You’re So Vain,” is extraneous to the genre of girl power pop. Maybe this makes Lana appealing, if only because she shakes up our expectations. Her yearning is to be submissive, not to be dominant, a far cry from the way many chanteuses have embodied the lyrics of Patti Page’s “Conquest.”

If that were all, maybe it could be forgiven. It would be a sweet rebellion against the popular themes of the day, one that has its problems but isn’t overly regressive. Only, the more you dig, the worse it becomes. Not just the content of her lyrics, and her constant playing of the damsel, but the visuals she chooses to use in her videos and albums are beyond simply self-stylized misogyny. Lana has a nasty habit of racializing her character, trying to make simple the complex legacy of mid-century American counter culture.

For instance, in her epic three-song music video Tropico, Lana appears to us in several visions. Once as Eve, once as a sex worker, once as a woman escaped from the city to be with her lover. The first one is the color of the dream of a flower-crown-era-Tumblr aesthetic blogger, the last is similarly as harmless. But that one in the middle is an iffy exploration of the actual economic conditions of sex workers, but absurdly tone deaf in the light of her comments about feminism. And all of the above is extremely tone deaf within the LDRCU. Is she supposed to be the girlfriend of a gang member, styled in heavy eyeliner and bandanas reminiscent of cholo culture? Or is she, as is inline with much of the rest of her videography, an upper-crust, Jackie-O-esque trophy wife with a listless stare? Neither are particularly good characters to play, relying on stereotypes and hazy filters to get the point across. 

But Lana has always had an issue with understanding the fundamental issues of her middle-distance gaze into American history. Yes, it’s cool Lana has A$AP Rocky play Kennedy, that’s pretty neat; but it’s also extremely uncool to do so while adopting a Cuban-sounding name while turning up the nostalgia factor on figures who, like Kennedy, did great harm to Cuban and Cuban-Americans. The conflict she creates within her own character is glossed over by her, and much of her audience. While critical pieces of Lana do exist, many fans--including myself at times!--get lost in her Venice Beach Baddie persona, and forget her self-awareness trends in the wrong direction. 

With the release of “Norman Fucking Rockwell” on the horizon (at the time of writing), though, we’re going to have to ask ourselves--is that a normal name for an album, or are we all having a collective fever dream? 

[kathrwn]

The thing about Brad

Charisma is a funny thing. Defining charm is hard. It’s hard at a party, but at least you can blame pheromones for an animal-like attraction to the boy with the baby blues. Of course, the physical pulchritude certainly doesn’t hurt someone, but they still must have a draw. It’s harder still to detect that charm through the screen. Even harder is to understand why that charm pierces our collective unconscious and leaves us with dropped jaws and hearts in our eyes. 

On all the little cooking shows all over the internet, one man has a charisma so undeniable it might be the only thing bigger than the jugs he uses for fermentation. 

I’m talking, of course, about the heartthrob Brad Leone. Tall, with a slab of well-aged organic grass-fed beef under his kombucha belly, Brad has become the breakout star of the Bon Appetit brand. 

We like watching beautiful people succeed--that’s why Brad’s videos are so popular. He jokes, he winks for the camera, he makes fun of himself, all to spill water (pronounced: wourder) across the counter, laugh it off, and present us with a zesty fermented pineapple drink. Throughout his series, It’s Alive, he is tasked with teaching a bunch of knuckle-dragging YouTube-watchers the intricacies of fermenting food. If people are so inspired to make giardiniera or hot sauce, then that’s just a happy accident. 

Like with all food-focused programming, cooking is an afterthought. The audience is here to ogle Brad, someone bro-ey enough to play touch football on Thanksgiving, but with a culinary touch that you know he helped make the cranberry sauce. Maybe he is the idealized man, one fluent in fun and levity, but physically firm enough to protect you in the winter months. Is that the cause then? Is Brad’s popularity just another case of the massive internet thirst pandemic giving us a new hero, a Prometheus who regifted us fermentation? 

Thirst is definitely one part of the equation, and his affability is another. Perhaps, though, Brad’s popularity is thanks in part to a weird erotic fear many of us recall: the jock.

Brad, with his scritchy, growing beard, and quiet curls that poke out from under backwards baseball caps and beanies, with a healthy layer of pudge covering arms as thick as the slabs of meat he butchers, is the transformed Biff. He looks like he might have shoved you into a locker, not because he disliked you, but because he thought it would impress his friends. In college, he read Socrates for the first time, eventually pursuing Aurelian stoicism that spoke to him more. He knows a guy, still smokes a little weed on the weekends with his pals from his intra-campus soccer team (which once played in the charity kickball tournament). 

An infinite number of internet posters have made us acutely aware of a link between fear and arousal. Surely this too goes back to the time of Socrates. (If anyone has quotes in verse, please share.) Urban Dictionary has an entry for “Scaroused” dated to 2011--about as old as Aristotle. The archetypical jock, with the leverage of both strength and social life, terrorized many of us. Maybe not with physical violence, but we are acutely aware of what they could do since teen movies defined them so well. The jocks in my own high school were smart boys, kind boys, but William Zabka let fiction overpower reality. 

But back to Brad. Brad would never pummel Ralph Macchio in mom jeans to a pulp, never threaten to put him in a body bag at the All-Valley Karate Championships. He is firm but not with his fists. And not with his words either. But with his confidence of an all-valley champion, comfortable with using his hands to manipulate lacto-fermentation into food.

A loveable jock, then, it could seem like Brad wields his charisma with abandon, rather than with a manipulative edge. He’s as goofy as he is gargantuan. We’re still afraid he could crush us under his fist, but we’re salivating just thinking about it. If he shoves us into a locker, our hearts beat a little faster because he touched us for just a moment. We’re beet red and helpless, weak in the knees when we see him. 

I can’t say with assurance that anyone actually cooks what they see Brad makes. Fermentation, pickling, and other not-quite-cooking cooking techniques are scary for beginners, many people beyond that too. I mean, I watch Martha Stewart, but I’ve never sought out Snoop Dogg for a blunt-and--baking-brownies evening. But the ilk of the traditional television cook was never the domain of thirsty twenty-somethings, craving for death and sex as much as the food to sustain life.